Meeting the future halfway
Meeting the future halfway
How parenthood and the pandemic have shaped our generation's relationship to time
All living is storm chasing. Every good heart has lost its roof. Let all the walls collapse at your feet. Scream “timber” when they ask you how you are.
– Andrea Gibson, “Angels of the Get Through”
Well before we lost all childcare and contact with the outside world, my body had already reached its breaking point.
In March 2020, my son, now three, was an adorable eight month old baby—one who never seemed to sleep. My husband and I had battled our way through years of infertility, IVF, a high-risk pregnancy, an emergency C-section, and postpartum mood struggles for both parents. Now we found ourselves washed up on the shores of a dangerously sleep-deprived new normal. I was still feeding my son in the middle of the night, then waking at 5am, navigating through NYC traffic to get to work and daycare, pumping breast milk on my lunch breaks, powering through the creation of a new English curriculum for my middle schoolers, and organizing materials for state test prep season. My writing practice, once a lifeline for me, had been erased from the page.
On paper, I finally “had it all.” A wonderful husband, a beautiful house, a longed-for child, a meaningful line of work. But in early March, with bags under my eyes and milk stains on my shirt, I told my boss the truth: something has got to give.
My boss was, and is, a uniquely amazing administrator. She didn’t shrug it off or tell me to suck it up. She said, “Let’s see if we can figure out a way for you to take Fridays off. You can use FMLA leave. We need you whole. Our work is important, but work is not the most important thing there is.”
To hear that from a school administrator, in a culture that all too often treats educators as though we are machines and not human beings, was priceless. Not to mention the plan she proposed. I would fill out the paperwork as soon as I could. One day at home a week! It was going to change my life.
You know what happened next.
In mid-March, I left my coffee mug, still half-filled, on a bookshelf lined with novels that my students never got to hold in their hands. I left that conversation about Fridays off alongside it, preserved in the amber of my memory.
Suddenly, I was home not one day a week but 24/7. Our son’s daycare shut down, and we had no family nearby, so my husband and I played Baby Hot Potato as we went from Zoom to Zoom.
Having lived through 9/11 and the ‘08 recession as young adults, we were somewhat more sanguine than our younger colleagues about our ability to weather this crisis. Both of us had also worked from home as consultants for a while, which gave me a bit of an advantage over fellow educators who had never worked outside of a physical classroom.
But my friends’ fear and confusion still impacted me, as did that of our students, who were universally plunged into the scariest moment in history they’d ever experienced. Their family members lost jobs and housing; my students lost the both the end of their childhoods and the beginning of their adulthoods. The empath in me soaked up every strong emotion I witnessed, even if I could only feel it reverberating from behind the black squares on-screen. I didn’t know what “secondary traumatic stress” (or STS) was at the time, but I felt it. I feel it still.
And yet: my own family no longer had a two-hour commute. I no longer had to be awake by 5am. My son no longer had the challenge of trying to sleep in a room full of other teachers’ babies who cried all day long. He started taking long, luxurious naps, like a college student home for Thanksgiving Break who’s been pulling too many all-nighters. Often, when I could, I snuck away to join him. Ultimately, I never did put in the paperwork for those Fridays off.
In fact, as I rested, I became one of the most vibrant, focused versions of myself I’ve ever known. I was not just energized again; I was galvanized. When the NY state tests were canceled, and therefore we had no need for our test prep unit, I was all too happy to scrap it in favor of a whole new digital curriculum on dystopian literature. Instead of answering multiple-choice questions about the invention of the John Deere tractor, we read The Giver. A book about how the world can change overnight when one person decides that they're not going to do things the way that they've always been done. Even if it means the end of the world as they previously knew it.
“We need you whole. Our work is important, but work is not the most important thing there is.”
Of course, we learned during the pandemic just how fragile we are as individuals, and how difficult it is to change the system. We learned that we often take the choices we do have in front of us for granted. We think that we can choose them later, fill out the paperwork on Friday. Sometimes, we can’t.
Ultimately, I couldn’t sustain the pace of my pandemic-induced professional renaissance. Hybrid education damn near broke me. A late-term pregnancy loss in Jan ‘22 finished the job. I’ve since downshifted into a much slower, seasonal life that suits the current me better. I have organized my life around the things that matter most to me. This means I may never “have it all” again.
As reporter Jess Grose wrote recently in the NYT, hustling to have it all, or jettisoning it all in favor of a fancy red convertible, may both be tropes of the pre-pandemic past. “Many [Millennials] felt they couldn’t be having a midlife crisis, because there was no bourgeois numbness to rebel against,” she found. “Rather than longing for adventure and release, they craved a sense of safety and calmness, which they felt they had never known.”
I deeply feel this craving for safety and calm–and it is a craving, one our ever-changing world may never fulfill, despite the end of lockdowns and daily temperature checks. And yet—sometimes I miss the version of myself that felt these things were within my grasp, if I could simply fill out the correct paperwork. The version who felt powerful and composed when she sat in front of a color-coded new unit plan.
I think of this former self as a benumbed-but-effective cousin of the “cool customer” in Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, who doesn’t cry as the ambulance takes her beloved away, and the girl who strides confidently through Cake’s “Short Skirt, Long Jacket,” who is touring the facility and picking up slack. The Cool Girl who needs nothing and offers everything: everything that America has taught Millennial women to be.
I am thankful for her service. She serves me still. This week, I have allowed her to play around with planning my summer: researching camps for my now-preschooler, sending out calendar invites and “blocking things off” for the future we hope is to come.
But another part of me—a more honest, more humbled, perhaps more whole part of me—will never forget the coffee cup that stayed on a shelf for a year and a half while I stayed at home. About what happened the last time I tried to make long-term plans.
That other part of me knows that we’re always living with one foot in the present, and one in the void.
“I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Cynicism and nihilism call out their Siren songs from this void— whyyyy botherrrr?—but to follow them is to be dashed on the rocks of depression. I try to heed my therapist instead, who tells me we heal from trauma through the gradual rebuilding of a trusting relationship with the world, and with each other. For me, this means reminding myself—in particular my tetchy body—that good things can emerge from the void along with the bad.
My body retains the breaking and the burnout, but my heart remembers the boss who cared, and the baby who slept. My body retains the fear I witnessed on the faces of my friends, but my heart remembers the group texts those same teachers started in crisis, so that we could check on each other’s kids and coordinate soup drops. My pandemic story is not complete without both truths. Writing it out now is the way that I lash these opposing narratives together, into a sturdier and more balanced raft, one I can ride out into a still-stormy sea.
One pandemic memory in particular buoys me. It also offers an encouraging glimpse into the worldview of the kids who will one day build the future for all of us. As we finished The Giver, sometime in mid-May 2020, my students showed up on Zoom eager to discuss the book’s famously ambiguous ending. For those who didn’t read it in grade school, Lois Lowry’s oddly-prescient premise is this: Jonas, the main character, undertakes a journey to liberate himself from a world in which no one remembers the bad or the good of their world’s history, a world of government-enforced numbness and collective amnesia. In the final chapter, the intrepid teen is limping along, carrying a child on his back, unable to go on. Something’s got to give. He sees the snow of uncertainty swirling up ahead on his path, and he gets on a sled, and he points it downhill. After that, the scene goes black.
The majority of my students said that of course, Jonas survived his harrowing escape in the end. How could he not? Even after all that had befallen them, my students believed in whatever was at the bottom of that mysterious hill. They were not benumbed by our circumstances, as it turned out, nor were they cynical. As he left the world of certainty and headed out into the mystery, these teens who had been trapped inside for months were sure that something worth trusting was still coming out of the dark, to meet our brave hero halfway.
Always in the dream, it seemed as if there were a destination: a something—he could not grasp what—that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the sled to a stop. He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant. But he did not know how to get there.
— The Giver
I know I’m safe in the present. But every year, in the spring, I find myself battening down the hatches as the storms of memory approach. I write to keep myself from coming unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I prepare for what psychotherapist Dr. Pete Walker calls an emotional flashback.
Maybe you too?
For those of us who parented through the pandemic, I wonder: can we forgive ourselves if we can now only manage to meet the future halfway? Can we forgive ourselves for still not knowing how to get all the way there, wherever there is? Because three years ago, none of us did. All of us had paperwork, of one kind or another, that we never did complete. All of us were left in the dark, searching the sky for some kind of sign, and seeing only the snow against black sky, swirling.
Can we simply allow ourselves to linger here a little while, as the snow swirls again? Can we remember that was not so very long ago?
If we have living children, could we remind ourselves that we don’t need to win every mealtime, every nap time, every tantrum, every fight over a toy or TV? (Their bodies may be telling us about what they remember, too, because their words cannot.)
If we are trying to build our families, could we simply offer ourselves compassion now, for every monthly cycle that ends in uncertainty? (Our bodies may still be waiting for signs of safety.)
If we are trying to bring artistic or professional creations to life, could we simply bow to our habits of procrastination or over-planning, revealing our repressed desires to drive away from the work we are not at liberty to quit? (Our brains may still trying to protect us from the unknown.)
Can we keep warm together here in the in-between, as the storm of memory arrives and then recedes each spring, before we turn to face whatever comes next?
NOTES:
If you are a teacher or healthcare professional who is experiencing secondary traumatic stress (STS) as a result of the pandemic or its aftermath, please give yourself extra grace or reach out for extra help during this time. I’m so glad that I did. (A story for another time.)
If you are experiencing symptoms of PTSD, or suffer from cPTSD that is triggered by pandemic memories, please check out Pete Walker’s list of coping strategies. I’ve found it helpful to bookmark this on my phone.
Andrea Gibson is a phenomenal poet who has helped me through many a hard time. Here’s the full version of that beautiful poem, quoted above.
Vanessa Mártir
hipped me to the phrase “The work we are not at liberty to quit,” which comes from an essay by Laura Davis. She’s got excellent taste in texts, and a new online writing class coming up on Mar. 20. The theme is New Beginnings.
Speaking of literature: This psychiatrist has an interesting take on Slaughterhouse Five and its link to PTSD.
You can also find links to the books referenced above (The Giver, The Year of Magical Thinking) in my Bookshop Bookstore. This is one way I try to be in reciprocity with the authors who have helped me most in grief.
It’s entirely possible that the planets, and not collective PTSD, are responsible for the “tsunami”-like vibes of this week–at least according to Chani Nichols. As she says, “This is not the week to get things done.” On the bright side, though: “Confusion is its own medicine.”
Oh my, we are living the same week! This really crystallizes it for me. Thank you for writing this. ❤️
“I try to heed my therapist instead, who tells me we heal from trauma through the gradual rebuilding of a trusting relationship with the world, and with each other. For me, this means reminding myself—in particular my tetchy body—that good things can emerge from the void along with the bad.
My body retains the breaking and the burnout, but my heart remembers the boss who cared, and the baby who slept. My body retains the fear I witnessed on the faces of my friends, but my heart remembers the group texts those same teachers started in crisis, so that we could check on each other’s kids and coordinate soup drops. My pandemic story is not complete without both truths. Writing it out now is the way that I lash these opposing narratives together, into a sturdier and more balanced raft, one I can ride out into a still-stormy sea.”